Need a DataGrid for Your UWP App?

DataGrids are critical in most business apps. Why reinvent the wheel when you can use the high-performing and open source Telerik UI for UWP DataGrid instead?

Building a Windows 10 app using the Universal Windows Platform? Chances are you’ll need a DataGrid for your application, and what a better choice than the highly-performant and feature rich DataGrid from the Telerik UI for UWP suite, which is also open source and available on GitHub.

As we all know, Grids are the backbone of most line of business applications out there. They are also by far one of the hardest components to create in terms of development time, functionalities, customization, responsiveness and speed.

Developers need to be able to deliver large applications tailored to the needs of the business and following the project requirements on tight deadlines. This means quite often they must choose between building the component internally or using a third-party toolkit, which provides it out of the box.

But you already know all of this, right? So where am I going with this blog?

So why should you choose the Telerik UI for UWP DataGrid? Well, for starters, if you missed it, as of February 2017 the whole Telerik UI for UWP suite is open sourced. Yes, this includes the DataGrid, meaning you are more than welcome to use it in your Windows 10 application. You can get the whole product package from GitHub and start using it right away. However, there is more to a component than its free availability.

Telerik UI for UWP DataGrid—Benefits and Functionalities

The Telerik UI for UWP DataGrid is an extremely powerful component in terms of both speed and functionality. It has been built from the ground up to deliver maximum performance and a native look and feel to your Windows 10 app. It provides advanced UI virtualization for high performance making the grid fast, fluid and responsive and capable of processing huge amounts of data blazing fast.

In addition, the DataGrid offers the ability to customize columns, through templates for the different cell types, as well to manually or automatically adjust their width depending on the content they include. This comes quite handy when one of your columns includes cells with visualizations or long strings of data. On the other hand, for columns consisting of icons, up-down arrows signifying increase/decrease, or other smaller objects, they can be scaled down to a smaller size providing better visualization of all the data in a certain row.

Another key feature that our DataGrid offers is the ability to sort single and/or multiple columns in either ascending or descending values, resulting in users being able to sort data with a single tap on the column header. These not only includes alphabetical sorting, but also numbers, values (True/False) and duration.

A well known and highly used functionality of any grid is the filter. With the filtering feature in the Telerik UI for UWP DataGrid your users will be able to filter ANY type of data, be it string, decimal, Boolean or date and time. There are also various filtering functionalities to further extend the capabilities of the control. For example, you can filter by:

is/no equal/great/less than

before and after

Contains/StartsWith/EndsWith

The rich API behind the control allows you to easily define the advanced filtering criteria through the code and suit it to the project requirements you are working with.

Here are a few other features that the component includes:

Cell or Row, Single or Multiple Selection

Grid Filtering customization

Grouping—users will be able to group data by simply moving a column header to the dedicated grouping panel

Verdict

All and all, the Telerik UI for UWP DataGrid is a truly advanced component, which can serve you well in developing Windows 10 applications, while also cutting down your development time substantially. The extensive documentation will decrease your learning time and will get you running in a jiff. If you are interested in learning more on add a Grid to your current application, check out this blog post on Getting Started with Telerik UI for UWP, where John Bristowe will guide you through creating an application and using the DataGrid and Chart components.

Otherwise, get the full project and source code from our GitHub repository and you are welcome to star or fork our project. We love it when people mess with our code and find issues with it (or not 😊).

Dobrin Grancharov

Dobrin is a Product Marketing Manager for the Desktop UI suites at Progress. He is passionate about trends and innovations in desktop application development, UI and UX. In his leisure time, Dobrin enjoys doing gymnastics, skiing, playing guitar and traveling the world. You can follow him on Twitter or get in touch through LinkedIn.

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